29 Oct 2014

A project that started 3 months ago is finally finished! After last year's successful Weeping Angel costume, my oldest daughter turned her attention to our other favourite show: Star Trek! After a viewing of the classic episode Best of Both Worlds she already figured 2014's costume: the fearsome and relentless Borg.

The wheels started turning right away of how to pull it off and make it look great. I experimented with a few 555 timers and some LEDs and that was pretty cool. But then I discovered NeoPixels and deeper and deeper I went. The whole thing evolved into something more elaborate that involved Arduino based microcontrollers, namely a Gemma and a Trinket. We both put a lot of work into it, but great results we had at the end. Read on for the finished product!

17 Oct 2014

Halloween isn't far away so I'm sharing some photos and info about last years' edition of my daughter's costume.

Being the big fans of Doctor Who that we are, my daughter asked last year to be one of the shows' most infamous and terrifying villains: The Weeping Angels. For uninitiated, they were introduced during the Series 3 episode "Blink", which became an instant classic. When observed they are nothing more than stone statues. But if you look away, or even blink, they become very much alive.

It turned out really nice so I'm sharing some info on how we put it together.

9 Oct 2014

That's right, vinyl! Back? Never gone. Our '80s era Technics (or rather the PSUs and pre-amps) are showing their age and we wanted to bring something current. The Stanton ST.150 Turntable is a nice one too. Really powerful motor, heavy base, tons of features.

It's getting lots of love from professional DJs, but in the radio broadcast world there are two problems.
One, the outputs are either consumer level unbalanced out or SPIDF digital. I avoid line level converters wherever I can and on the digital side it's AES/EBU. This is easy enough to fix with a SPDIF to AES adaptor.

The other, bigger problem is it has no remote logic, which is something we really need to start and stop the turntable from a button press on the console.

So I'm going to void some warranties and add some basic start/stop logic using a Adafruit's awesome and tiny Trinket microcontroller.